Where does it start? Doing more than you thought possible, or are you? Could you? Should you? Possible is the best combination of the four delivery factors: Education, Ability, Experience and Willingness!
So what is up with us always wanting to climb higher mountains, ford wider, deeper streams and follow EVERY rainbow. From the earliest of most childhoods, we are tempted, coaxed and coached to dream of doing the impossible. Not that dreams are bad for us, they indeed are not, and the “impossible” is occasionally quite possible. We should aim high and aspire to our best, but somewhere along the way, we need to realize the reality of what we are capable and what we might think we are capable. Otherwise, we can be continually plagued by the tyranny of unrealistic expectations, which we many times accept as real, and wind up miserable about trying hard and falling short.
As an educator and coach, I have discovered 4 delivery factors that bring a sobering reality to preparing, performing, and continually improving In any endeavor we undertake. They are: Education, Willingness, Experience and Ability. For memory’s sake, they form a cryptic acronym, ExAWi, which we can use to rescue us from the tyrannical deception of enthusiastically over expecting and realistically under delivering.
All we need is an ExAWi moment or two where we can clearly see the reality of our true capacity and capability. I have two such moments to share: The first happened in my first semmester of grad school back in 1979. After a grueling three months of working and night schooling, I earned 2 A’s and a B. Feeling pretty good about these grades, I felt suddenly different when I learned that at Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, a C was considered a failing grade and a B was just slightly better. That was the only B I received. The culture suddenly redefined my sense of my ability, experience and willingness. The education was there for the taking.
The other wake up call came 4 years later as I struggled to break 40 minutes as a 40 year old 10K runner. On a training run one morning, I was “schooled” by a leggy collegiate 10K runner who simply asked, why are you struggling to run fast when you have such short skinny legs? He candidly told me that legs like mine shouldn’t worry about breaking speed records, but should just enjoy running for running’s sake. Wake up call #2: Get in touch with your ability, accept it and move on. Truly knowing how good you are, and could be, should govern how hard you need to work at it. I had the education, the willingness and the experience. Ability was my Achilles Heel and I needed someone to let me know it. Capacity and capability need to match up, so the best possible out come can be expected, prepared for, and delivered. This idea will lead us to the next Scratch about the reality of ability and the two disturbing words that often incorrectly define it. Until next time. M